This paper discusses the trend in feelings of political efficacy among United States adults from 1964 to 1970 in the context of theories of political socialization. This literature has characteristically treated “regime norms” as established early in political socialization and largely independent of subsequent political events, a conception challenged herein. A second theoretical issue concerns the claim that stable democracies require large and constant “reservoirs of diffuse support” which enable them to weather periodic crises of effectiveness. The implication (drawn by the theorists themselves) is that components of diffuse support (including but not limited to political efficacy) are largely independent of disappointments with day-to-day political outputs, and this too is rendered unlikely by our results.